ClickFunnels vs. LeadPages—a Detailed Comparison

Are you looking for the most in-depth comparison between ClickFunnels and LeadPages? 

Both platforms are among the most widely-used solutions when it comes to landing page building and lead generation. Before getting into the details on which platform is better, we must answer another question—why is a quality landing page important for lead generation in the first place? 

Conversion rates represent one of the most important metrics in the world of digital marketing. Converting the biggest possible number of website visitors into prospective leads is the basis of any online marketing strategy. As the point of first contact between your visitors and your website, a landing page is essential in that process.

According to b2bml, this is especially true in B2B marketing—where the standard for good conversion rates on landing pages is at 25%. If you want a quarter of your visitors to become leads, you will need a stellar landing page. And that’s where platforms like ClickFunnels and LeadPages come in.

The Main Differences between ClickFunnels and LeadPages

Professionals in the B2B digital marketing industry use different types of lead generation software for various purposes. That’s why it’s important to differentiate brands like ClickFunnels and LeadPages and know what they’re good for.  

ClickFunnels is a platform containing a wide range of tools for streamlining your sales, while LeadPages (as the name suggests) focuses specifically on building landing pages. Unlike the latter, ClickFunnels gives you the ability to easily control your entire sales funnel, while LeadPages only provides options for designing a landing page.  

Choosing between ClickFunnels and LeadPages isn’t about picking the best out of two identical products. Instead, the choice depends on your digital marketing needs. LeadPages is more often used by entry-level marketers who only want an easy way to design a landing page. ClickFunnels helps with email marketing, affiliate management, and the planning of your entire sales funnel. 

To summarize:

ClickFunnels 101—Sales Funneling Basics

ClickFunnels’ platform helps businesses and entrepreneurs design pages optimized for high conversion rates and an efficient sales funnel. 

Image source: onlinemarketingsecrets

This “sales funnel” amounts to a string of pages designed with one result in mind—to lead most website visitors where you want them to go. While the end goal is almost always a service or product purchase, it could also be a more immediate one, like entering a free trial period or providing their email addresses. 

The specifics of a digital marketing funnel may differ, but a basic one consists of:

• Landing Pages—the first page a user encounters on your website, usually intended to gather lead information like an email address

• Content Pages—introducing your pitch and your product or service

• Sales Pages—where you will sell your offer to the website visitor

• Checkout Pages - where the transaction occurs

• Upsell Pages—allowing you to make additional offers to the consumer 

Creating such a website with captivating graphics and a decent level of sales optimization would usually require the work of multiple professionals. That’s the main point of platforms like ClickFunnels—the ability to create an online presence for your business without employing graphic designers or other experts. 

You don’t need to have experience in online marketing or in web design with ClickFunnels. Within its software ecosystem, you can do everything from running a membership website to operating an email marketing campaign.

ClickFunnels is optimized for a variety of digital marketing goals. Users with more marketing savvy can design their own sales funnel, or they can make use of the ClickFunnels templates. The platform offers a two-week free trial, which comes with six funnel templates. 

ClickFunnels Page Design and Marketplace

Those with more experience in online marketing and web design can offer their funnel designs to other users via the ClickFunnels marketplace. Others can purchase these designs if they don’t want to bother with the details of achieving high conversion rates. There are also premade pages designed by the platform’s developers, which can be accessed for free with a ClickFunnels membership. 

Designing your own pages in the ClickFunnels editor isn’t difficult either, as it has a simple drag and drop interface. With the standard subscription, you can create a maximum of 100 pages, while the Elite package sets the limit at 300. Web hosting can also be handled using ClickFunnel servers. 

Email Marketing

For digital marketing professionals, email marketing and newsletter campaigns still represent one of the quickest ways to lead generation. An email is still the best way to approach a cold lead. That’s why industry leaders use white label email marketing software to make their campaigns as efficient as possible and reach the widest range of leads. 

One of ClickFunnels’ advantages is that you do not need to leave their ecosystem to pursue this avenue for lead generation. They offer an Actionetics system to their users—designed for communicating with leads using premade messages. The system functions based on triggers—if someone subscribes to a newsletter or completes another type of action, they will automatically receive an appropriate text or email as a response. 

Features of ClickFunnels

A ClickFunnels membership provides access to the following features which may vary according to your specific package:

• Premade website templates and themes 

• Page design 

• Easy-to-use visual editor

• Email marketing software

• Split testing

• Variety of sales funnels templates

• Conversion metrics

• Membership websites

• Web hosting

If you are unsure of what these features entail, here is a brief overview:

Top Features

With such a variety of features, it’s important to highlight what separates ClickFunnels from both LeadPages and other competitors. 

The visual drag and drop interface is definitely one of its biggest advantages. ClickFunnels has managed to create one of the most intuitive page builders anywhere. When their copywriting claims that you do not need any coding skills to successfully create a page on their platform, it’s actually true. All of the elements, from images and videos to countdown clocks, require only a few clicks to add. 

Their second main selling point is the marketplace for templates and sales funnels. The option to sell an entire funnel can be a great revenue stream for marketers, or a bonus to add on your own upsell page. Someone selling white label marketing software may include a premade sales funnel as a bonus—offering a more complete service. 

ClickFunnels and Your Business

Considering all of the features that the ClickFunnels platform offers, how can a business benefit from this software in practice? 

The importance of digital marketing for the success of any business enterprise cannot be overstated. Having a product that could generate a lot of traffic with the right marketing isn’t enough—learning how to translate that into sales can be arduous. Still, developing an original sales funnel and the accompanying practicalities (website design, hosting, maintenance, content) can be costly and time-consuming. 

That’s why ClickFunnels is a worthy alternative—it completely streamlines the process of creating a sales funnel and putting it into action. Even professional marketers utilize platforms like these to decrease their expenses and start generating revenue sooner. 

Plenty of major players in this industry strive to diversify their portfolios. Many do so by rebranding white-label marketing software from providers like Sell SaaS and reselling it as their own personal product. In that situation, having an effective sales funnel is crucial—mishandled marketing for a heavily personalized brand could make it more difficult to sell other products in the future. 

This is just one of the many examples where using a premade sales funnel template is the best way to go. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel—all you need to do is find a funnel that fits your product. The implementation itself via ClickFunnels is simplistic enough.  

ClickFunnels Integrations

A big draw of the ClickFunnels package is that it offers a full sales funnel software suite. For those who want additional functionalities, the platform is also compatible with a number of other marketing tools:

ClickFunnels Integration with WordPress

While ClickFunnels has a perfectly functional page building suite, many people still prefer to use Wordpress as their main content management system. With that in mind, ClickFunnels has developed a WordPress plugin that can be used for seamless integration. The plugin allows you to transfer pages developed in ClickFunnels directly into a WordPress domain. 

ClickFunnels Integration with Shopify

It’s possible to connect a product page developed in ClickFunnels with a Shopify product page. This will only allow you to forward shipping information to Shopify without payment processing. 

LeadPages 101—Building a Great Landing Page

Image source: eventuring

After thoroughly examining the expediency of using ClickFunnels, we will analyze how it fares in regards to its closest competitor—LeadPages.

LeadPages is a simple tool for building landing pages. Marketers use it when they need sales pages that are optimized for lead generation. The platform will be of use to you if you require a landing page without much effort or coding knowledge. 

How It Works

One of the basic tenets that LeadPages has in common with ClickFunnels is that its target audience isn’t code-savvy. You won’t need to possess any HTML or CSS knowledge to come up with a working landing page via LeadPages. At its core, this platform is a visual page editor with an intuitive drag and drop interface. 

LeadPages has a variety of pre-built landing pages. You can use these in a manner of minutes—all you need to do is to change a couple of images and add some text to the template pages. It should be noted that this editor is more rudimentary compared to the ClickFunnels’ offering. 

Still, it is useful for beginners that don’t need anything more than an affordable and simplistic page building solution. LeadPages is integrated with email service providers, allowing you to collect leads that arrive through pages you build on this platform. 

To summarize, you have two options when making new pages in LeadPages:

1. Drag and drop editor

2. Designer pre-made templates 

Features of LeadPages

LeadPages provides its users with the following functionalities:

1. Intuitive drag and drop editing—easy creation and editing of landing pages

2. Professional page templates—for people who don’t want to work on a page from scratch

3. Opt-in forms—a variety of opt-in forms for lead collection, including pop-ups

4. A/B testing—split testing of all page features

5. Lead data notifications—receive lead statistics via email

6. SMS sign-ups—provide website visitors with an SMS sign-up option 

Use of LeadPages in Your Business

Image source: toptenmarketingtools

The role of LeadPages in your business plan is simple: it provides you with a number of quality entry-level landing pages at an affordable price. With a few tweaks, these will help you raise your lead conversion rate and nurture a growing email collection. 

It is crucial to note that LeadPages does not have email marketing capabilities. This platform can only assist with capturing leads, not sending content to them. You will need external email marketing software for that, though LeadPages does have excellent integration capabilities. 

LeadPages Integration

While LeadPages does not have many digital marketing features beyond landing page construction, it can be integrated with:

• Google Analytics

• Google Tag Manager

• Hotjar

• JavaScript Analytics

• amoCRM

• Contactually

• InfusionSoft

• LionDesk

• Pardot

• PipeDrive

• Salesforce

• ZoHo CRM

• ActiveCampaign

• AWeber

• Campaign Monitor

• Constant Contact

• Drip

• Emma

• Gmail

• GetResponse

• MailChimp

LeadPages Integration with WordPress

Unlike ClickFunnels, LeadPages is much less of a content platform—it’s particularly focused on landing page design. This makes it easier for WordPress integration, which functions via a small plugin. Its main purpose is to enable the installation of alert bars and landing pages that you create in LandingPages on your WordPress website.

LeadPages Integration with HubSpot

Customer service and relationship building are particularly important for marketers and entrepreneurs. HubSpot is an exemplary tool for such people with highly personalized brands. That’s why LeadPages provides full integration with HubSpot, though only for users with its Advanced package. 

ClickFunnels vs. LeadPages—How They Stack up

Keeping all of this in mind, is ClickFunnels a better choice than LeadPages? 

The answer depends on what you’re looking for. If budgetary concerns are an important factor for you, LeadPages is definitely more affordable. 

However, that comes at a price. At the end of the day, ClickFunnels simply offers a more complete digital marketing software ecosystem. You won’t need to find an additional web host with ClickFunnels, nor will you need a different email marketing software package, not to mention its shopping cart capabilities. It even has options for membership sites and affiliate programs, all in one environment. If you count all of the additional software that you need with LeadPages, it may even end up being more expensive. Still, for people who only need to make a professional landing page on short notice, LeadPages is not a bad choice.

Conclusion

To summarize, ClickFunnels is definitely the more expansive (and expensive) software solution than LeadPages. When it comes to anything more than building a landing page, LeadPages requires external software, while ClickFunnel has integrated options. For anything more serious like reselling information products, ClickFunnel will provide a more streamlined marketing platform.